[Tade0]

I've worked with such people and on applications made by them.

All that is usually done at the expense of others - be it teammates or future maintainers.

It works great for MVPs and such, but falls flat on its face when you have to add new features to a three year old application, whose original creator moved on a while ago.

[acephal]

This is exactly the situation I'm in at my job and I'm the only developer left from the MVP team, which was headed by a consultant whose scope was supposed to be smaller but convinced management, when they would not budge or listen at all to their in-house leads (I was a junior at the time) on the same issues, that they'd get results if they gave him the project (and a helluva paycheck). To his credit, he helped us put out a decent MVP, but he booked it when the company wouldn't give him an even more insane pay raise to stay on full-time and it turned out the MVP was not scalable and was designed for a different case than the one our company had and so suffered perf issues the moment things got serious. But management was okay with all this cause they got the MVP they wanted to show off to potential acquirers and-lo-behold the company got sold, that management disappeared, and I'm stuck behind walls of intervening actors from addressing fundamental issues in the design

[Tade0]

Interesting. I assume nobody figured that it's high time to rewrite the damn thing?

[specialist]

Every (successful) rewrite I've ever done was in secret.

I once spent 6 months fixing someone else's MVP. Every bug fix exposed 2 more. I begged for a do over. Nope, we've invested too much money to abandon.

Once I understand the problem well enough, I banged out a full rewrite in two weeks. I had just one bug before release (one of the trig equations had the wrong sign, facepalm slap).